September 26, 2012 11:30am EDTSeptember 25, 2012 1:48pm EDTEven before the farce that was the end of Monday night’s game in Seattle, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had begun to outlive his usefulness. As David Steele writes, the referee debacle merely is the last straw. He must go. Now.

Watch This

The image it conjures up from coast-to-coast, even in Seattle, the home of the recipients of the greatest gift since the Three Wise Men crossed the desert, is of a bunch of clowns bumping into each other, throwing confetti, spraying seltzer bottles and telling the world that the guys who didn’t catch the ball at the end won the game.

It also has an image of a crowd of rich guys in togas fiddling while their sport’s reputation burns, knowing that they lit the flame strictly for their own amusement and have no intention of putting it out until they’re finished laughing at the fleeing victims.

By itself, is the nadir of Scab Ref-Gate (at least so far, since it’s only been three weeks) enough reason for Goodell to step down, or for the owners who hired him to now fire him?

Probably not.

It’s the collective body of work over the last 18 months that should do it.

Right now, Goodell is the walking definition of “conduct detrimental to the game.” If he were a player conducting his business the way he has lately, he’d be sitting out half the season. Of course, he is the man who suspended a player who hadn’t even entered the league yet (Terrelle Pryor), for actions that violated absolutely nothing in the NFL by-laws (they were NCAA violations).

At this moment, the integrity of the sport Goodell runs is not being questioned, not being doubted, but is being openly disregarded. The NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball haven’t been dragged through the mud the way the NFL is now.

The NFL has been the Non-Stick Football League for so long, what it’s now disintegrated into seems catastrophic. It thrived and banked on being forgiven in contrast to all of its big-time sports competition. But little by little, the pedestal has been chipped away in the last year and a half. It’s barely standing now.

The referee debacle is merely the last straw. It landed like a fallen space satellite on top of this pile:

The player lockout last summer: Regardless of which side the fan picked to support, Goodell and the owners still threatened to cancel the season unless the union gave them what they wanted, in the face of record revenues and a future of even more riches.

The push for an 18-game season: The popular sentiment was a landslide against it, yet Goodell persistently claimed publicly that the fans wanted it; in truth, the NFL wanted it because it would make it more money, and ignored the duplicity of campaigning for that and for improved player safety at the same time.

Bounty-gate: A noble quest to eliminate pay-for-injury schemes in an already-inherently violent sport, but poorly executed to an almost comical degree. Considering all the challenges in front of judges and arbitrators, and how they’ve already suffered notable losses there, the NFL is looking like it brought a case it couldn’t prove, didn’t think it needed to prove, and felt good about shoving it down everyone’s throats. Whether that’s true or not no longer matters, as bad as the perception has become.

Judge-jury-executioner: The aforementioned Pryor case is only one example. Discipline for on- and off-field behavior has struck a league-wide nerve. Badly-needed alterations in the process – taking power out of Goodell’s hands—were traded off for the need to actually play games last summer. The unilateral system is still in place, and still seen as fundamentally unjust.

The player-safety crisis: As much as Goodell has made the issue a public priority, nobody has forgotten how it only became so when the evidence he and the league had ignored and downplayed for so long became overwhelming; after a parade of tragedies involving retired players had become known, and after the wave of lawsuits threatened to bankrupt the league.

The referee lockout: Merely spits in the face of every claim that the safety of the players and integrity of the game are paramount.

The power trip: Is there more proof necessary to conclude that the point of the hard-line tactics against players and refs alike are less about financial certainty than about flexing muscle just for the sake of flexing it?

Put it all together, and that is one singularly rotten way to run a league.

Stand back and critique what he’s done to taint the very “shield” he keeps claiming to protect, the shield that has so much value yet is being devalued by the hour … and you’ve got a case for the NFL owners to take the man responsible for it, dump him and put someone with more sense and less hubris and entitlement in his place.

Goodell can save them the trouble, though. He can either get over himself, settle with the real refs immediately and begin to turn the ship in the right direction before it runs aground.